Tuesday, March 07, 2017

The Teaching of Economics

In 2013, with funding from the Institute for New Economic Thinking, University College London, Friends Provident Foundation, Azim Premji University (Bangalore) and Sciences Po (Paris), a group of concerned economists created CORE, the Curriculum Open-Access Resources for Economics. Wendy Carlin from University College London led the initiative, and I was fortunate enough to have been involved from the outset. The group soon grew to encompass a couple of dozen members from a broad range of countries including France, Chile, Colombia, Turkey, and India.

CORE’s vision is that economics should be an inquiry into the fundamental problems facing humanity today and the ways that economic reasoning can address them, not just a training in abstract problem solving. We sought to directly address the problem of a lack of good teaching resources consistent with this vision, and the attendant issues, including limited incentives for faculty and their teaching teams to make use of what is available.

Since its launch, CORE has successfully begun to produce high-quality resources for the teaching of economics through this global collaboration of scholars, and to distribute these resources free of charge worldwide under a Creative Commons license. Our e-book The Economy, currently in beta, is being taught as the required introductory course at University College London (UCL), the Toulouse School of Economics, Humboldt University (Berlin), and other top economics departments in Europe. It is also being taught at the Lahore University of Management Sciences, Azim Premji University (Bangalore), the University of Sydney, and Universidad de los Andes (Bogota). More than 2,300 verified instructors have been cleared for access to CORE’s full range of supplementary teaching materials, and over thirty thousand students spread across 78 different countries have registered for access to the e-book.

As part of its strategy to improve the teaching of economics CORE is now seeking to expand its outreach and impact in the United States. It will do so in collaboration with Barnard College, which has just received a major award from the Teagle Foundation for exactly this purpose. My department colleagues Homa Zarghamee and Belinda Archibong will join me in directing this effort.

At the heart of the initiative is a series of workshops involving faculty and graduate students, who will be selected through a competitive application process and provided with stipends and partial reimbursement of travel costs. These workshops will be designed to bring together instructors who already have experience with implementing CORE, and a larger group of potential adopters. The first workshop will be held at Barnard on August 17-19, 2017. We will post a call for applications soon, and are currently in the process of hiring a project manager.

Among our goals is the creation of a cadre of confident, networked, new PhDs excited about making teaching a fulfilling and central part of their career in economics. Graduate students who complete a workshop will be certified as CORE-Teagle Fellows, a designation that we hope will become a credible signal of commitment to quality teaching among employers, especially liberal arts colleges and public policy schools. We would also like this to be a signal of scholarship potential, and will accordingly screen applicants for exceptional promise in both research and teaching.

Over the longer term, we also want to identify a set of institutional partners with shared goals for the improvement of economics education and a commitment to the development and use of high quality, open access instructional content. To further these goals, we will launch the CORE Consortium, a membership program for institutions willing to enter into a long-term, multi-year commitment to support faculty and graduate students using CORE, and host workshops on a rotating basis. By the end of the 36-month period covered by the Teagle grant, we hope to have at least half a dozen institutions on board as members, as well as a leadership team and an administrative structure.

We are enormously grateful to the Teagle Foundation for funding this exciting new initiative. Further updates will follow once a project manager is in place.

1 comment:

I'm having a little trouble with this statement from chapter 9 (with the concept introduced in chapter 6):

"We have shown unemployment can exist in a Nash equilibrium in the labour market. In Unit 6, considering an individual firm, using proof by contradiction we saw that if everybody had a job (no unemployment) then nobody would work hard enough for firms to make profits and therefore nobody would be employed!"

It seems to me that you only require a worker's next best option to be worse than his or her current job in order to have people work hard enough to justify efficiency wages. What do you think?